Remind: A Free Service for Sending Text Messages to Groups of Parents & Students

With the Northern Hemisphere’s school year just underway, we wanted to take this opportunity to inform our readership of rabbis and educators about a handy service called Remind.

This site is free for teachers to use and helps you connect with students and stay in touch with parents in a secure manner. You see, when you use Remind to text students and parents, your phone number is not revealed and your students’ cell phone numbers are not revealed to you.

The way in which this works is that students and parents have to opt-in if they want to be added to your text messaging list and have to enter a confirmation code to state that they do want to be contacted by you through the service. For an example of how this works in one school, click here.

While no security measures are perfect or impenetrable, this free tool allows teachers to text message students and parents safely and securely — and not cross any professional/educational boundaries.

Remind also offers some great features such as letting you schedule messages to be sent. This feature is really handy because during the school year, you are busy serving as an administrator, teacher, parent, etc. However, these text message reminders can be scheduled over the summer or late one Motzei Shabbos when things are a little less hectic.

And then, on the evening before your field trip to perform tashlich, watch how a shofar is made or to a matzah factory, parents will receive a text message, along with a reminder about what to pack for the field trip and an emergency contact number to use during the field trip.

Another nice feature, is that Remind allows you to send a text message with an attachment. You can use this to send parents a picture of your class in action or make sure they get the link to review questions with their child ahead of the Mishnah test that your students are having later in the week. You can even pull files from your Google Drive or Dropbox account to send as attachments. Remind has complete directions for the attachment process here.

Feel free to watch the instructional videos for Remind that appear below.